WoW classic and CensusPlus (CensusPlusClassic)

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Mon Aug 05, 2019 8:17 pm

Have you looked at the fork of CensusPlus called CensusPlusClassic?

Depending on how Blizzard structures the integration of WoW and WoWClassic I may or may not be concerned about the fork.

There are a number of things about how CPC was created that bother me but on the other hand .. shrug.

Christophrus has some clean up ahead of him.. as even on his new site he is refering to CensusPlus addon and not his own fork.
I have also seen many of these types of errors in the lua code files he modified. I haven't looked that closely so the errors may or may not impact the original CensusPlus.

At least if someone uploads the wrong data set to this server the upload will be automatically dropped as invalid.

On the Plus side at least there will be some basic tracking of character data for users to view via his website.

Balgair · Post by **Balgair** » Tue Aug 06, 2019 11:41 am

I saw it on Curse, thought it rather cheeky if he hasn't asked you first, I suspect you could get it taken down from the main addon sites if you wanted to make a point, as it's not like he was picking up an abandoned addon whose author can't be contacted.

I'm waiting and hoping for an official Classic Censusplus, although if you give blessing to the other version then hey, I'm cool with using whatever works, but it doesn't particularly sound like it's an authorised version at this time...

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Tue Aug 06, 2019 4:21 pm

Sadly no attempt was made to contact me, much to his loss as I would have been happy to give him my blessing and tips on working on the code.

Since the software runs via Blizzard Entertainment code, we can not claim much legal rights. And very few developers have tried to claim those rights. Censusplus was released under a standard GNU licensing package which is used world wide for many code projects.
the GNU license is more of a gentlemen's agreement to be nice to each other and not cause problems for other coders.
Rollie did place copyright notices on his code which are valid by US Copyright laws, but to be honest they are more trouble to enforce then the code is worth.

Christophrus does say on his website "I'm a junior web developer and recently finished the freeCodeCamp curriculum and now using this project to improve my coding skills and to get some real world experience." Which means he has little knowledge and little to no real world experience.. which is fine everyone has to start somewhere.

So I give him my blessing (for what it is worth) and hope he learns fast enough to not cause conflict problems in game and on the web.

As far as Warcraftrealms.com being involved with WoWClassic... well we have heard exactly what I expected to hear from Metalbeast the site owner... nothing.

That being the case, developing the 'Official_CensusPlusClassic' (Yup, I do wish Christophrus had attempted to contact me), does not give us much more then what Christophrus appears to be doing.
Which is sadly so much less then what we have become use to for the census data.

Considering the above and the fact that I passed on the latest free play time Blizzard offered, I have little interest with World of Warcraft at this time.
I will be buying a time card so that I can see how they re-implement classic, and I have set aside three days off of work at the end of the month for Vacation (or coding) time...). But I am unsure it is worth the time cost for such little return.

Balgair · Post by **Balgair** » Tue Aug 06, 2019 6:13 pm

A shame, leaves a bad feeling when someone just takes your hard work, just asking would've probably left everyone happy all round! Not greatly surprised by the Metalbeast (lack of) response, I'd expected to not have a database for Classic anyway, so on that front, this other version could be a good thing, but it's just the way it's been done, politeness goes a long way.

Understandable if you don't do an official version, hope you enjoy playing a bit of Classic anyway

Feels really close now, I've got a ton of stuff going on in RL, and have a horrible feeling I'll be moving house right AT the launch time, typical lol, and a shame as it's rather dented my hype for it, given my mind is elsewhere... still looking forward to playing it though, even if time is limited at first.

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Mon Aug 19, 2019 9:29 pm

I was incorrect about the 'No Attempt' part.. I discovered today that he had left a comment for me.. unfortunately it was in the one place where I don't get notifications.. so I never knew he had reached out to learn if I was planning to make a 'Classic' version.

Have no clue where CensusPlusClassic is going as his site has gone dark.. and I haven't found any further info via google search on any of the sites he hit to advertise the new addon.

What would really be neat is to compare WoW Classic numbers vs. the numbers we collected back for those patches.. but I am afraid much of our data was lost in storage squish before Metalbeast tossed his hands up and just threw a lot of money at it for storage.

Balgair · Post by **Balgair** » Tue Aug 20, 2019 9:03 am

It'll be a shame if he's already abandoned it, I was hoping for an update after the stress test as the current edition doesn't fully work...

It runs census, and records data, BUT it won't complete the census, its final query is 1-0, repeated forever, so you have to manually stop it. At least it functions enough to get an idea on a server level, I too would love to compare with original numbers, that'd be a facinating comparison.

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Tue Aug 20, 2019 7:00 pm

Well I don't want to get anyone's hope up...
but today I was contacted by both Rollie and Metalbeast!

Where this will go, I do not know... but maybe there is hope..
and maybe there might be a classic version in game and near here on the web.

and maybe it won't happen.

Balgair · Post by **Balgair** » Tue Aug 20, 2019 7:16 pm

Wow! I saw Rollie posting (welcome back if you read this

), but if he's managed to unearth Metalbeast I am impressed. Website support was something I hadn't even considered as possible; that'd be fantastic, although I won't get my hopes up too much yet lol, fingers crossed though. Anything I can help with, just ask

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Wed Aug 21, 2019 6:06 am

Oh don't worry... I expect you will be beta testing..

I have decided to work the in game code for Classic..
and testing will be needed.

If fact testing is needed right now..
I saw a report that Spanish client was not tracking Mag'har Orc.
But then I also saw another who claimed that CensusPlus only tracked level 120.....

Balgair · Post by **Balgair** » Wed Aug 21, 2019 6:42 am

Great, I look forward to Official Censusplus for Classic then

Ah, after some poking around both types of Spanish I see what's probably happened there; I think you might have corrected it for Latin American Spanish, which calls them "Orco mag'har", note lower case m. European Spanish calls them "Orco Mag'har", upper case M

Either way the regular orc search picks them up (I can find individuals when I check the player lists by class), but EU Spanish isn't displaying them (LA Spanish is fine), I'm thinking the different case is the most likely problem there, sure we've had similar case sensitive problems in the past.

Not the first time LA/EU Spanish has had different localisations, I guess we just need to treat them as totally different languages in future and not assume the same thing works for both, *sigh*.

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Wed Aug 21, 2019 6:37 pm

Balgair wrote:It'll be a shame if he's already abandoned it, I was hoping for an update after the stress test as the current edition doesn't fully work... It runs census, and records data, BUT it won't complete the census, its final query is 1-0, repeated forever, so you have to manually stop it. At least it functions enough to get an idea on a server level, I too would love to compare with original numbers, that'd be a facinating comparison.

Which version of CensusPlusClassic were you running? His latest was v0.4

Balgair · Post by **Balgair** » Thu Aug 22, 2019 7:55 am

v0.5, so I guess 0.4 wasn't the latest?

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Thu Aug 22, 2019 6:34 pm

Oh my bad.. you are correct that was 0.5

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Fri Aug 23, 2019 8:57 am

Looking further at Christophrus fork, it became apparent that at least for the first pass, he was limiting his data view only to the big picture.

His website (as he first implemented it) looked at WoW Classic as a single unified identity.
He also decided to not collect the data needed to track hourly trends.
Which would make sense if you weren't tracking by region or by realm.

As to the failure to complete the census run... I think I know what happened .. if Blizzard faithfully implemented the API calls.. there was (is) a subtle bug in how they return the result data.
This bug, if you followed exactly what they claimed for the call.. would get hung and not properly return "I'm done with data".
The addon would think there was more data.. the server is done (and won't respond anymore).

I have much of the Classic rebuild done, except for the major process of unwinding all the Cross-realms fixes.

As to Battlegrounds, I still intend to shutdown Census processing when entering .. While current CensusPlus might not crash .. I still don't want to take any computer cycles away from Battleground play.

While working on the code. I came to a brain freeze.. it has been so long, I had forgotten that Goblins weren't an original race

BuGsY · Post by **BuGsY** » Wed Aug 28, 2019 6:17 am

Will there be a way to omit certain level ranges? Like ignoring 1-20 when scanning and on the graphical display?

Post by **Rollie** » Wed Aug 28, 2019 9:19 am

Wouldn't say I'm 'back' by any stretch of the imagination. But hoping to help with a bit of house cleaning

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Wed Aug 28, 2019 4:05 pm

BuGsY wrote:Will there be a way to omit certain level ranges? Like ignoring 1-20 when scanning and on the graphical display?

Scanning Yes and display no, maybe, I don't know.
With WoW live.. Blizzard disabled /who scanning for any levels below 20.
This was due to automated guild invites to newer players being spammed constantly.
And no the guild invites were not for the new players benefit.

Currently with WoW classic.. we are back to the ability to scan all levels again.
What I don't know is if Blizzard figured out a different way to stop the spamming.
IF not, I expect they will at some point re-implement the scanning block.

....
There is/will be a variable near the beginning of the code.
File is named.. addon-name.lua the actual addon-name has not be set in stone at this time for classic.
For live it is CensusPlus.lua

"local MIN_CHARACTER_LEVEL = 10; -- Minimum observed level returned by /who command (undocumented and barely acknowledged.)"

I expect that the default scanning minimum will remain at 10.
You can adjust this for your personal preferences.

Again for WoW live where the level is set at 20, trying to go lower will have no effect as Blizzard will not return any results below level 20.

How will modifying the variable impact uploaded data? Hardly at all.
If you set the MIN above the addon default, you will not track characters that could have been.. but almost certainly someone else will track the same characters.
If you set the MIN below the addon default, you will sent extra data to the website that will just be ignored.

Having said that.... I don't really see a reason to modify this variable.
After the initial rush to get in the game is over, the vast majority of active characters will be in the top few levels of the game.

As noted in posts above setting the minimum to level 10 or even level 5 will eliminate all the bottom feeders.. Auction house, Bank alts etc.

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Thu Aug 29, 2019 2:52 am

It is possible that Christophrus has he website back up.. or not.

I just tried it and my browser warned me that the https security certificate was not valid for that site then blocked it until I manually allowed.

Since the certificate in use appeared to be his testing certificate, I went ahead and allowed...
only to be hit with apparently a requirement to download some javascript library.

At which point I said .. oh He** no !!
I don't download something I have no clue about.

Then even worse, after doing some research ..
I found it was something originated by a certain very large company who is very involved with the internet..
and has created use changing software and environment.
But can't seem to stop finding ways of grabbing your information and selling it to others.
Oh the company name? Facebook.

The js library may be fine and safe..
But I only have this one machine for connecting to the internet.. and I won't load stuff that could compromise what I have.

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Thu Aug 29, 2019 2:54 am

Speaking of https certificates...
Hey Metalbest, Rollie....
let us get into a more secure age... and buy a certificate for this site!

Post by **bringoutyourdead** » Sun Sep 01, 2019 5:37 pm

bringoutyourdead wrote:Speaking of https certificates...

I had a nice telephone call with Metalbeast this afternoon.

It was a wide ranging discussion concerning this site, and I hope to soon see some fixes to problems that have popped up over the years.

We were discussing hardware requirements to keep the site responsive and a comment of his lead me back to Christophrus' site.
Which has gone dark again.
The comment from Metalbeast is that this site requires nearly 50GB of ram memory to keep all the background database processing happy.

I am trying really hard to keep the upload data format identical to CensusPlus for World of Warcraft live.
This will allow Metalbeast to better plan the best approach to adding Classic data to our collection.